Hearing evaluations (e.g., hearing threshold tests, speech intelligibility tests, etc.) for cochlear implant recipients are typically done in an audiometric sound booth in a clinic. This requires the recipients to come in to the clinic, which may be inconvenient and/or difficult for many due to distance and/or cost. Moreover, sound booth availability at some clinics is often limited due to the high number of people serviced by these clinics.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to be able to perform hearing evaluations for cochlear implant recipients in non-sound booth settings. For example, it would be desirable for a cochlear implant recipient to be able to perform a self-evaluation of his or her hearing while the recipient is in his or her home. In these scenarios, sound tokens (e.g., audio used to perform the hearing evaluations) could be input directly into a direct audio input of a sound processor included in a cochlear implant system.
To be considered a viable alternative to in-clinic evaluations, remote evaluations should yield results that are substantially equivalent to those that would be achieved in a sound booth of a clinic. Unfortunately, due to a variety of factors, such substantial equivalency has heretofore been impossible to achieve.